“Peo­ple who reported med­i­tat­ing for an aver­age of 20 years had higher brain vol­umes than the aver­age per­son, researchers report in Fron­tiers in Psychology.

Kurth and his col­leagues write that they can’t say med­i­ta­tion caused its prac­ti­tion­ers to lose less brain vol­ume, how­ever. Other habits of long-term med­i­ta­tors may also influ­ence brain volume…

“Unem­ploy­ment is no cake­walk. It’s well doc­u­mented that an invol­un­tary job­less state can take a steep toll on one’s emo­tional and phys­i­cal health, and now new research illu­mi­nates a more sub­tle, if highly cor­ro­sive, con­se­quence the inabil­ity to find work can have on a per­son. In short, it appears that unem­ploy­ment has the power to change what we gen­er­ally con­sider rel­a­tively fixed – i.e., it can alter Read the rest of this entry »

“In this era of “self-directed” retire­ment (no pen­sions, you make all the invest­ment choices) post­pon­ing mak­ing a real plan poses a par­tic­u­lar risk to future secu­rity. Not only are the logis­tics of plan­ning hard enough—when to col­lect Social Secu­rity, how to bud­get for expenses, what to do with savings—but the decline in cog­ni­tion that Read the rest of this entry »

Neumitra’s tech­nol­ogy mea­sures the effects of stress on brain health per­for­mance in var­i­ous ways, from wear­able tech­nol­ogy to tablet and mobile soft­ware and algorithms…Though Break­out Labs did not dis­close the exact amount of the invest­ment, the grant-making orga­ni­za­tion typ­i­cally invests up to $350,000 in each startup…”

“The Amer­i­can Senior Hous­ing Asso­ci­a­tion (ASHA) has announced a new part­ner­ship that aims to use neu­ro­science to deter­mine whether senior liv­ing com­mu­ni­ties are ben­e­fit­ing their res­i­dents. As part of the ini­tia­tive, La Jolla, California-based Neu­roVigil will mon­i­tor Read the rest of this entry »

“A meta-analysis of 193 brain-imaging stud­ies shows sim­i­lar gray-matter loss in the brains of peo­ple with diag­noses as dif­fer­ent as schiz­o­phre­nia, depres­sion and addiction…The find­ings call into ques­tion a long­stand­ing ten­dency to dis­tin­guish psy­chi­atric dis­or­ders chiefly by their symp­toms rather than their under­ly­ing brain pathol­ogy. Read the rest of this entry »